302 redirect

Temporary is the whole point

A 302 does what any redirect does for a visitor. Ask for one address, land on another. The difference is what the server says about the reason: this is a detour, not a move, so keep asking for the original address.

Search engines take that at face value. They hold on to the original address as the one they list and treat the destination as a stand in. Nothing about the original address gets retired.

A bakery makes it concrete. Through December, /order sends everyone to /holiday-order, because the holiday form is the one that matters that month. In January the rule comes off and /order goes back to being the ordering page. Nothing about the structure of the site actually changed, so nothing about the structure should be announced as permanent.

A visitor cannot tell the two codes apart. Both move her to the same place, at the same speed, and she has no reason to look at either one. The status code is a message to software, not to people, which is exactly why the wrong one goes unnoticed for so long.

The same logic covers a section closed while it is rebuilt, a page pulled down while it is rewritten, and a test where half the visitors are shown a different version of a page. All of them are detours with an end in sight.

One honest caveat. Search engines read the announced intent as a signal, not a promise. A temporary redirect left up for a long stretch may eventually be treated as though it were permanent, because the behavior says permanent even when the code says otherwise.

The mistake that shows up on rebuilt sites

Here is the version that costs local businesses something. A 302 is the default in plenty of hosting panels, plugins, and control screens. An owner moves a page for good, the tool writes a 302 without asking, and everything looks fine, because visitors land exactly where they should.

What does not happen is the handoff. The old address stays the one search engines keep, the new address takes longer to stand on its own, and the credit the old page earned never fully transfers. Then one day the old address is retired and there is nothing to show for the years it spent earning that standing.

The test is a question you can answer in a sentence. Are you bringing the old address back on a date you could actually name? Then a 302 fits. Are you never bringing it back? Then it is a permanent move and it should be announced as one.

When the pages being redirected are also the pages people find you through, the choice stops being a hosting detail and becomes a search decision, which is the kind of call we handle as part of SEO.

Reading the three codes together

Lined up, they are simple. A 301 redirect means moved for good. A 302 means away for now. A 404 page means there is nothing here and no forwarding rule of any kind.

Indexing is the thread running through all three, because each one tells a search engine something different about which address deserves to be listed. Getting the code right matters less to the visitor, who lands on the same page either way, and more to the question of which address you are asking to keep.